1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a treatment-object modifying device, a printing apparatus, a printing system, and a method of manufacturing a print.
2. Description of the Related Art
In conventional inkjet recording devices, because a shuttle system in which a head shuttles in a width direction of a recording medium that is typified by paper and film is dominant, it has been difficult to improve throughput by high-speed printing. Consequently, in recent years, to deal with the high-speed printing, developed has been a single-pass system that records at one time by arranging a plurality of heads such that the whole width of the recording medium is covered.
The single-pass system is advantageous for speed-up. However, because the time interval to eject an adjacent dot is short and the adjacent dot is ejected before the ink previously ejected permeates the recording medium, there have been problems such as beading and bleeding in which the coalescence of adjacent dots (hereinafter, referred to as ejected droplet interference) occurs, whereby the image quality is deteriorated. There have been situations in which such problems are particularly noticeable when printing is made on non-permeable media and slow-permeable media such as film and coated paper.
As for the technologies to solve such problems, already known have been a countermeasure method of applying a pre-coating agent on a medium in advance so as to enhance the cohesiveness and fixity (also referred to as setting property) of ink, and a method that uses UV-curable ink. In the method that uses the pre-coating agent, however, the water of the pre-coating agent, other than the water of the ink, needs to be evaporated and dried, and thus it necessitates a longer drying time and a larger drying device. Furthermore, in the method that uses a pre-coating agent of a supply article or that uses relatively expensive UV-curable ink, there has been a problem in that the printing cost is increased.
Thus, in recent years, as another method to enhance the setting property of ink, a method of performing plasma treatment on a media surface has been developed. It is known that, when plasma treatment is performed on a media surface, the media surface has hydrophilicity. Performing such plasma treatment on a medium as pretreatment can improve the hydrophilicity and wettability thereof even when a medium such as coated paper which has poor wettability is used, for example, and as a result, a print of higher image quality can be manufactured. Furthermore, because the plasma treatment is a dry process, a drying process is not necessary, and thus there is an advantage in that the modification treatment can be performed on the surface of a treatment object more efficiently. Related-art examples are described in Japanese Patent No. 4414765 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-058995.
In the foregoing method that applies a pre-coating agent on a printing medium in advance, however, the water of the pre-coating agent, other than the water of the ink, needs to be evaporated and dried, and thus it necessitates a longer drying time and a larger drying device. Furthermore, in the method that uses a pre-coating agent of a supply article or that uses relatively expensive UV-curable ink, there has been a problem in that the printing cost is increased.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a treatment-object modifying device, a printing apparatus, a printing system, and a method of manufacturing a print that can manufacture a print of high image quality while reducing an increase in cost.